As I continue my work on a subcommittee tasked with thinking about student evaluations of teaching, I’ve become even more convinced that we need different types of feedback on teaching. Our end-of-term course evaluations can sometimes give us useful feedback, but I’ve often found that I can’t do a lot with them. While it is […]
As we enter the mid-semester break, I write to offer two suggestions. First, now is a good time to think about soliciting informal feedback from students about the course. If you feel that aspects of the course aren’t going as well as you’d like, ask the students. After two years of hybrid learning experiences, I […]
Contemplative educator Parker Palmer suggests that we teach who we are. What I take him to mean is that a whole person is standing in front of the classroom and that who we are as a person impacts how our students perceive us and respond to what we are attempting to teach. On the one […]
Assessment is easy to misunderstand. There is a sense that assessment is something we must do, even though so much research asserts that assessment is the key to learning. Why the disconnect? To hazard a guess, assessment often isn’t aligned with our goals and objectives. If our assessment isn’t connected to things we care about, then […]